Cumulative Fire Count and Severity Data
Overview
Visualizing Wildfire Patterns: Mapping Decades of Fire Activity and Severity Across the U.S.
Wildfires have shaped landscapes for millennia, playing a fundamental role in ecosystems, influencing vegetation patterns, soil health, wildlife habitats, and influencing the evolution of fire-adapted species. However, the nature of wildfire has changed significantly in the past century. This data story covers two distinct yet complementary data layers:
Cumulative Fire Count (1950-2023) and Fire Severity (1985-2022).
Both datasets provide insights that reveal changing patterns over each cumulative time period. Understanding these patterns—both in terms of fire frequency and severity—is essential for balancing wildfire’s ecological role with the need to protect communities and resources.
Photo by Nicole Geri on Unsplash
Photo by Federico Bottos on Unsplash
Wildfires have long been a natural component of the Earth’s ecosystems, shaping landscapes, rejuvenating soils, and sustaining biodiversity. Some ecosystems, like certain forests and grasslands, have evolved to depend on periodic fires for their health and regeneration. However, in recent decades, wildfire behavior has changed significantly.
This shift is driven by multiple factors, including changes in weather patterns, land use, and human activity. Rising temperatures, prolonged droughts, earlier snowmelt, and shifting precipitation patterns have created more fire-prone conditions.
At the same time, fire suppression efforts, expanding development into wildlands, and changing vegetation patterns have altered the way fires burn and how often they occur.
This complexity highlights the dual challenge of wildfire management: protecting human life, property, and infrastructure while recognizing and preserving their vital role in maintaining healthy ecosystems. To address these challenges, decision-makers need tools that harness the best available data and science. Vibrant Planet’s Cumulative Fire Count and Severity Data offers another way to peer into the history of wildfires across the United States, providing a critical resource for managing fire-prone landscapes, restoring ecosystems, and shaping policies that balance risk reduction with ecological health.
What is cumulative fire count & severity data?
At its core, the Cumulative Fire Count data layer records the total number of fires that have occurred at each location over a 74 year period (e.g. from 1950 to 2023), offering insights into long-term fire frequency trends across the contiguous United States.
In contrast, the Fire Severity layer covers a different period, from 1985 to 2022, based on available data. It measures the intensity and severity of these fires over the 37-year period, categorized using satellite-derived burn severity indices and field-validated metrics. This data can help distinguish areas affected by frequent, low-severity burns from those impacted by high-severity wildfires. Together, these datasets provide researchers, land managers, and policymakers with crucial insights into how wildfire patterns have evolved, allowing for better decision-making to balance ecological benefits with risk mitigation.
These datasets go beyond simply serving as a historical fire archive. They also are integral to wildfire science by supporting advanced analyses like Percent Fire Return Interval Departure (pFRID). A dataset that is vital for identifying where fire regimes have deviated from historical patterns—areas that might now burn too frequently or not frequently enough—helping to inform strategies for ecological restoration, risk reduction, and sustainable land management.
Map depicting Cumulative Fire Count Data: A gradient from black to magenta to yellow represents wildfire frequency over the past 73 years, with black indicating no fires and yellow marking areas with the highest fire activity.
Photo by Samuel Ferrara on Unsplash
Data Sources
The Cumulative Fire Count and Fire Severity datasets are derived from authoritative fire perimeter and burn severity datasets. To improve usability, Vibrant Planet processed the source data, in order to ensure that all geometries were valid before transforming them to a common coordinate reference system. These refinements enhance consistency and accessibility, making the datasets easier to integrate with other spatial analyses.
The primary data sources include:
- USGS Welty & Jeffries (2021) – Combined Wildland Fire Datasets for the United States and Certain Territories, 1800s-Present. This dataset provides historical fire perimeter data from 1950 to 2020.
- NIFC WFIGS Interagency Fire Perimeters (2021–2023) – Wildland Fire Interagency Geospatial Services (WFIGS) dataset. This dataset extends the record through 2023.
Geography
These datasets cover the entire continental United States (CONUS), encompassing diverse ecosystems from fire-prone forests to arid grasslands.
To enhance usability, the dataset is divided into tiles based on the Landsat Analysis Ready Data (ARD) tiling system. This system allows users to focus on specific regions for detailed analysis or merge tiles to examine patterns at larger scales. Access the ARD tile grid shapefile here.
Map by VPDC, 2025.
Are you interested in applying this dataset to your research or management project?
We want to hear from you!
Vibrant Planet and Vibrant Planet Data Commons are actively tracking how these datasets are used to support impactful wildfire management and research. Contact us to share your ideas, feedback, or success stories, and help us make data-driven solutions a reality.
why these datasets matter
Wildfire science and management are increasingly dependent on data-driven solutions, and these datasets are cornerstone resources for understanding fire patterns and addressing long-term trends. Their value extends across multiple domains:
- Historical Insights: By mapping where fires have occurred most frequently and at what severity, these datasets highlight trends in fire-prone areas, helping to identify hotspots of activity and regions with significant fire regime shifts.
- Advanced Modeling Support: As key inputs for data like pFRID, they help quantify deviations from historical fire regimes and supports predictive modeling of wildfire behavior.
- Land Management Strategies: Land managers can use these datasets to prioritize areas for ecological restoration, fuel reduction treatments, or community wildfire protection efforts.
- Policy and Planning: Policymakers gain actionable insights into where to focus fire prevention strategies, regulations, and funding to reduce risks and enhance resilience.
- Ecological and Climate Research: These datasets support studies on the ecological impacts of wildfires, their correlations with environmental conditions like temperature and drought, and the recovery potential of burned areas based on fire severity.
Photo by Meritt Thomas on Unsplash
Photo by Jack Bass on Unsplash
Applications for research and land management
Cumulative Fire Count and Severity Data can be leveraged in a variety of ways to enhance research, management, and policy efforts:
Quantitative Wildfire Risk Assessments (QWRA)
These datasets provide detailed fire frequency and severity data for evaluating landscape vulnerabilities and identifying areas most at risk of future fires.
Ecosystem Restoration Planning
In regions where fire is a natural part of the ecosystem, frequent and severe burns may have degraded habitats, requiring restoration efforts to rebuild ecological health.
Climate and Fire Studies
Researchers can explore the relationship between climate factors (e.g., warming temperatures, droughts) and changes in wildfire activity over decades, helping to forecast future fire trends.
Wildfire Behavior Modeling
These data are foundational for improving and validating fire simulation models, enabling land managers to predict fire spread under different conditions.
Integrated Landscape Analysis
Paired with vegetation, hydrology, and topography datasets, these data provide a more holistic view of landscape dynamics, revealing how fire interacts with other natural processes.
Photo by Nagara Oyodo on Unsplash
Bridging the Gap Between Science and Action
The Cumulative Fire Count and Fire Severity datasets don’t exist in isolation—they are part of a larger ecosystem of wildfire science. Their high spatial resolution and combined perspectives make them valuable complement to other datasets, such as the USDA Fire Occurrence Dataset, while their interoperability with climate models and vegetation maps opens doors to deeper analyses.
This interconnected approach is key to addressing the dual challenges of fire management: reducing risks while maintaining the ecological role of fire. With data like this, researchers and land managers can work together to develop smarter solutions—solutions that balance the need for fire as a natural process with the imperative to protect human communities and infrastructure.
Explore the Data
Behind this Story
Take a deeper dive into the patterns and trends shaping wildfire behavior across the U.S. Access the full datasets to analyze fire frequency, severity, and historical shifts in fire activity. Whether you're a researcher, land manager, or policymaker, this data provides the foundation for informed decision-making and action.
References
Welty, J.J. & Jeffries, R.L. (2021). Combined Wildland Fire Datasets for the United States and Certain Territories, 1800s-Present. U.S. Geological Survey. Available at: https://doi.org/10.5066/P9Q9LQ3Q.
National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC). WFIGS Interagency Fire Perimeters (2021-2023). Available at: https://data-nifc.opendata.arcgis.com
Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS). Burn Severity Data and Analysis. Available at: https://www.mtbs.gov/